


Once You've Been to Hell...

by K_Hanna_Korossy



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 08:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5778322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_Hanna_Korossy/pseuds/K_Hanna_Korossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tag to "Grave Danger." Now they just have to dig through their own feelings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once You've Been to Hell...

For R

 

She’d been sure they’d find Nick dead. 

Sara hadn’t mentioned that to anyone, with the others so desperately optimistic about Stokes’ chances buried alive in some unknown location by a man crazy with grief. But Sara had never been an optimist, and she hadn’t expected to see Nick alive again. 

Not that he looked alive now. He lay motionless in the hospital bed from the combination of drugs and exhaustion, the rise and fall of breathing not visible from the other side of the observation window through which Sara watched him. He was cadaverously pale underneath the red, puckered ant bites, his face still drawn into the rigor of fear she’d seen on many a corpse. If it weren’t for the regular spikes on the heart monitor, there would have been no visible sign of life. 

Sara breathed deeply and kept watching. 

Catherine had just left, needing to go pick up Lindsay from school. Sara suspected the older woman just needed to _see_ Lindsay more than anything, to hold her daughter and forget the nightmare of the last thirty-six hours, but she’d only nodded. Sara was good at keeping secrets, like the tears she’d seen Catherine shed in the lab bathroom when Willows hadn’t known she’d been there, and the ones discretely wiped away as they’d stood side-by-side and watched Nick sleep. Catherine was the mother of the team, calming, all-knowing, in control, but that night she’d been scared, too. It hadn’t surprised Sara at all that she’d ridden in the ambulance with Nick to the hospital. 

She and Warrick. Sara’s gaze momentarily shifted to the window a few feet from Nick’s bed, and the tall form that stood there, his back to her. Rick had insisted on staying for a while, arguing that Nick would need someone there when he woke up. He’d already been proved right twice as Nick roused, disoriented and panicking, only to be calmed back to sleep by Warrick’s touch and voice. Stokes had been cut off from human contact in his fiberglass tomb, the live feed his captor provided going only one way, so it had made sense for someone to stay there, and for that someone to be Warrick. He’d been Nick’s best friend before Sara had even transferred to Las Vegas, and would know best how to get through to him in his confusion. 

“You should get some sleep.”

Sara turned, startled at the intrusion even though she knew the voice. She wasn’t easy to sneak up on, but Grissom stood just a few feet behind her in the quiet hallway. His eyes moved from her to Nick, that same magnetic attraction that drew all of them to Stokes that evening, then back to her again. 

“There’s a cot downstairs in the NICU waiting room we’re allowed to use,” Grissom continued calmly, his eyes piercing as always. 

Sara nodded, for once not discomfited by his presence. “In a little bit. I don’t think I could sleep yet, you know?”

He didn’t push, didn’t even raise an eyebrow, just walked up to stand beside her at the window. Sara turned back to share the object of his gaze. 

“Preliminary tests show there was more than twice the Semtex in Nick’s box than the one the dog was in. Gordon wanted to make sure Nick didn’t get out alive.” 

The news wasn’t surprising, and it was an odd comfort to be talking about something safe like evidence, even if it was evidence that had almost meant Nick’s death. “That was a good idea, using the cantilever.” 

“I saw it used once to remove a car that was surrounded by sand. We couldn’t figure out any other way to get to it without compromising whatever was buried in the sand.”

Sara filed that one away as she always did a new idea for crime scene processing. The familiar subject loosened the tightness in her chest a little. 

Grissom shifted something in his hand and stepped away from her, through the door into the room beyond. Sara tucked her hands into the pockets of her slacks and watched. She’d always been good at that, so often helpless to _do._

Warrick, ever vigilant, looked up as the door opened, and managed a flicker of a smile at the sight of his boss. They were all exhausted, not just from having been up for about forty hours straight, but from living on adrenaline half that time. But Nick would be the only one getting any sleep for a while yet. 

Gil spoke a few words to Warrick, and handed him what he’d been carrying. A tape recorder, Sara realized, and frowned. Come to think of it, Nick had had a tape recorder in the box with him. She’d completely forgotten about it in the tumult of the rescue, but it would have been collected at the scene if it hadn’t been blown up in the explosion. That and the gun Nick had nearly shot himself with in his despair. 

Sara pulled her hands out of her pockets and tucked them under her arms. 

Warrick was grimacing, but he moved to the distant corner of the room with the tape recorder and hit a button. It wasn’t the machine Nick had had, which was probably broken and would be evidence, anyway. So would the tape inside, but Sara guessed Grissom had pulled rank for that one. If Nick had left Warrick a message, it was probably best he heard it right away. 

Grissom, meanwhile, had taken up Warrick’s post beside the bed and leaned over it with an intensity he usually saved for evidence. Nick seemed to feel it, too, his head rolling on the pillow and his lips moving faintly. Gil gently laid a hand on Nick’s forehead, murmured something back. In the corner, Warrick was swallowing hard, his eyes bright from whatever he was listening to. Nick grimaced, took a deep breath, and sank back into unconsciousness. 

Grissom and Warrick had been the ones to keep Nick calm at the scene, too, both while they struggled to get him out of the coffin alive and then once they’d yanked him out and he’d gone fetal and in shock. Sara had just watched then, too, as Rick had uncurled Nick against him, rubbing his neck distractingly while Grissom brushed the rest of the ants off and talked to him, and the paramedics got him ready for transport. Nick had been too dazed to understand much at that point, but he would know he’d been found and wasn’t alone. 

Grissom wasn’t a people person, which he was the first to admit, but he knew his team. It had been he who had pried Sara’s childhood secret from her with compassionate sensitivity, and who’d reached and calmed Nick in the midst of his terrified attempts to free himself from his coffin and after. Sara didn’t know what the name Gil had called Nick meant to either of them—Pancho? Poncho?—but Grissom had and it had worked. Concern had provided him with instincts that his temperament lacked, but only with those he cared about.

Sara swallowed the burn in her throat, eyes following Grissom as he went from the bed to Warrick’s side, touching his shoulder and saying something briefly to him. Rick nodded heavily, and took the tape recorder back to Nick’s bedside. He was already rewinding the tape to listen again. Grissom walked out of the room, leaving the two of them behind. 

Again, they he and Sara stood next to each other at the window, looking inside. Of all the CSIs, she and Gil had always been the outsiders, never quite connecting with the world outside the lab and the scene. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place. 

“He left you a message, too.” 

For the first time, Sara flinched, surprised. Nick had been thinking of her? They’d never been especially close, no more than the rest of her teammates. What could he have to say to her?

Nick was restless again, and Warrick turned the recorder off and set it aside. He hitched a hip up onto the edge of the bed and rested his hand on the flat of Nick’s stomach, then his wrist. Nick immediately grabbed his hand, clutching it so hard that even Sara could see his knuckles blanch. His eyes were closed, still more asleep than awake, but his face was twisted, suffering plain on it, and she found her own expression mirroring his in empathy. 

Sara was sure they’d find him dead, if they found him at all. At first, she’d expected it to be from suffocation, but then she’d seen the gun. And she knew what she would have done in his place. If Nick hadn’t been stronger than she… The pain that brought still bewildered her. Somewhere along the way, their team had become the most functional family she’d ever had, and now she’d almost lost a brother. And it still hurt. 

Her face was wet, and she rubbed at it as surreptitiously as she could. The last thing she wanted was Grissom to see her losing it again. 

She should have known better. If there was one thing Gil Grissom was, it was observant. But he didn’t say a word, didn’t try to explain it all or make it all better. He just draped an arm around her and let her cry against his shoulder where at least no one else would see. 

By the time she looked up again through watery eyes, Nick was sleeping once more. Rick was holding his hand now in a tight handshake-grip, and Sara wondered if Nick felt the contact in his sleep. From the peaceful way he was resting now, she thought so. It always helped to know you weren’t alone. 

“Come on, let’s find that cot.” Grissom was leading her away from the window. 

With a last look back, Sara went. She knew what she wanted to now, even if she didn’t completely understand it. 

“He’ll be all right.” Or maybe Grissom said “ _We’ll_ be all right,” Sara wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter; both applied. It would take time, but they’d make it. They were survivors, all of them.

And they were family. 

The End


End file.
